Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: JoeLo on February 17, 2006, 09:08:47 pm
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This baby played everything right up until Halo came out for PC, generally on full quality. I had a six year run with it.
Please sticky as everyone coming here needs to no this.
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Drink much?
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Nope even if I did it would be underage. Seriously it was the greatest card ever.
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I suppose this is on the same level as the dizzy thread.
But whatever. I like a graphics card as long as it runs FSO and Homeworld.
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I remember when I wanted a Voodoo so I could see the lights on an Orion.
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? software mode did that well enough.
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:smacks head:
NOW you tell me...
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I remember when I wanted a Voodoo so I could see the lights on an Orion.
Oh, god. Sharp stabbing pain in the frontal lobe. At first we played FS1 with either no 3d acceleration or something crappy.. and then we got a Voodoo(2, i believe) and then WHOA-LY **** everything looked so much better, namely the Orion. God, that's a blast from the past.
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Its really not on the level with the Dizzy topic. This is a relevant point, it was actually a great card.
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And this should be stickied why?
Oh woo! Let's sticky opinions!
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but it doesn't deserve to be stickied. stickied topics are for things of importance, just because you say it needs to be and for an outdated video card that my ATI Radeon 9250 can do 4 times as better.
[EDIT] Raa beat me to it.
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It was pretty much a joke the last part about it being stickied. I have a Radeon 9250 pro as well is yours PCI bus?
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Software mode rules all in FS1. You get both the "glowmaps" and the high resolution textures. Although in those days the processors weren't fast enough to run software smoothly, so a Glide supporting card was it worth it just for the framerate increase.
I have my V3 3000 lying around somewhere. It was great for its time but is not as versatile as the GF3 / V2 SLI combo that sits in my old game computer, especially since I have two Glide games that only work properly with V2s and nothing else.
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A pair of Voodo2's can play Quake 4 is that kick ass or what?
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You've GOT to be kidding me. I'm pretty sure anyone who's been up on hardware already knows about this. But I got one little gripe about Voodoo cards. The only thing that card had going for it was GLIDE, and that's IT. The ONLY Games I thought ran well on a 3dfx card were any games that used Gilde natively, such as Hexen II, and Deus Ex to name a couple. Of course, if you had an nvidia card like I had way back then (Riva TNT, the FIRST TNT card) all you needed was the Glide wrapper for DOS and it'd play with that Glide accel, just as good as one of those voodoo 2's that I think were out at the time. Take away the specific GLIDE API and your precious Voodoo is no better than any other graphics card that was released around the same exact time that one was. Everyone thought Rendition Verite would have been the top dawg, then S3. Oh, anyone remember S3 and it's two failed ressurections? I'm GLAD that nvidia "acquired" STB, because that eliminated one goofy-ass standard that was already starting to show it's age.
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I'm leaving this open since it seems to have turned into a proper discussion rather than spam. That said JoeLo, please cease spamming topics of this kind.
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A Voodoo 3 may be nice, but I'd rather have a Radeon 9-series or X-series... even the low end Radeons beat the hell out of a Voodoo.
Running a game is not the same as running it well.
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Other points AGAINST Voodoo-Cards are:
- AFAIK, Voodoo cards only ran games at 16 bpp
- Hardware Transform & Lighting that came with the GeForce 256
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Pfft. V3 was a pansy card!
Best card setup ever was that 6xVoodoo2 thing that Quantum 3D did. :D
And then there's the OpenGL accelerator in my Sun Ultra 5 - The machine is terminally slow by today's standards, but that 3D card is as long as my arm!
nVidia and ATI have come a long way 'tho - All nVidia's cards sucked arse until the GeForce2 GTS.
ATI's Radeon, aside from having a much better name (I mean GeForce... that has to be the stupidest name I've ever heard!), was always good hardware.
Sadly, ATI are like Creative, and couldn't write a decent set of drivers to save their lives. They have improved there considerably 'tho.
One card I want to see for Real is a 3Dfx Voodoo 5 6000.
It just looks impressive :D
I could put it next to this unnamed VESA 10/100 Ethernet card and my AWE-32 (Which has RAM sockets on it!) and sigh happily :)
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Oh, god. Sharp stabbing pain in the frontal lobe. At first we played FS1 with either no 3d acceleration or something crappy.. and then we got a Voodoo(2, i believe) and then WHOA-LY **** everything looked so much better, namely the Orion. God, that's a blast from the past.
I still remember the first time I saw Freespace 1 running on a 3DFX graphics card using Glide... It was mind-blowing.
Why did they drop Glide?
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A push towards more standardised 3D APIs is why.
I'm in two minds about this - On the one hand, I liked Glide; It was heavily based on a subset of OpenGL, and a really nice API to code with.
In fact, when learning 3D programming basics, Glide is a great API to start off with.
Of course, it was 3Dfx-only, and thus propriatory which is not a good thing. I like Standards.
That said, the main Standard we're stuck with is D3D, which is *not* a nice API to code with IMHO - Everything seems done in really odd ways. I don't know if that's just because I was used to OpenGL and Glide, but I really hated Direct3D.
(This may have changed quite a lot - Most of my D3D experience was from DirectX3 to 5...!)
OpenGL will never compete with D3D I think - OpenGL is a stable API which was primarily create for use with CAD, 3D Modelling etc.
D3D is designed purely for games, so the standard is not very well thought out and full of holes, but it's on the cutting edge of graphical effects.
OpenGL extensions gave OGL an edge in the early days (Voodoo2 owners loved OpenGL because D3D didn't support multi-textures for a relatively long time!), but now D3D is evolving a lot faster; In fact, it's driving the feature-set of modern 3D cards instead of the other way around as it was when OpenGL was the bigger API!
I just wish DirectX didn't break backwards compatibility all the time - Some of my more obscure older games blow up with DirectX 9, but luckily I can still dual-boot to Win98, and even use Glide if I need to (Yup, that Voodoo2 SLI is still hooked up ;) Now if only it bloody worked in Win2k!!)
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You've GOT to be kidding me. I'm pretty sure anyone who's been up on hardware already knows about this. But I got one little gripe about Voodoo cards. The only thing that card had going for it was GLIDE, and that's IT. The ONLY Games I thought ran well on a 3dfx card were any games that used Gilde natively, such as Hexen II, and Deus Ex to name a couple. Of course, if you had an nvidia card like I had way back then (Riva TNT, the FIRST TNT card) all you needed was the Glide wrapper for DOS and it'd play with that Glide accel, just as good as one of those voodoo 2's that I think were out at the time
Yeah, I got a V3 over a TNT2 back then because almost all the games I played in those days were Glide only or ran best in Glide. There were a lot of such games back then, which gave 3dfx cards a huge advantage.
What glide wrapper is that? I've never seen one that works on modern hardware, at least in my Glide-only games.
Best card setup ever was that 6xVoodoo2 thing that Quantum 3D did. :D
That was actually 8 of them, if you're referring the Mercury system:
http://digilander.libero.it/F1Land/3dfxarchive/download/media/gallery/quantum3D-mercury-16x3dfxvoodoo2pci-96mb-3.jpg
http://www.3dfx.ch/gallery/albums/q3dmercury/quantum3d_mrecury_008.sized.jpg
This thing has a coolness factor that still remains unrivalled today. :D
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I could put it next to this unnamed VESA 10/100 Ethernet card and my AWE-32 (Which has RAM sockets on it!) and sigh happily :)
Until today, I thought VESA was related only to graphics hardware, but it seems that the VESA bus has other uses too...
We learn something every day.
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OpenGL will never compete with D3D I think - OpenGL is a stable API which was primarily create for use with CAD, 3D Modelling etc.
D3D is designed purely for games, so the standard is not very well thought out and full of holes, but it's on the cutting edge of graphical effects.
OpenGL was originally developed for workstations. But it is also perfectly suited for today's hardware accelerated graphics. Direct3d on the other hand was an api developed by a small company, primarily for software 3d rendering. MS bought it in 1996. When hardware acceleration became a reality, OpenGL was a perfect choice for a standard api, but MS only supported D3d on W9x, and gave it an unfair advantage. WinNT was a completely different story, they had to put in OpenGL because the OS was designed for workstations. So they had to support OpenGL but prevent the game industry from using it instead of their crappy D3D. That's when they came up with this *ingenious* BS about OpenGL being a stable api for modelling and CAD, implying it was a raytrace renderer not suited for realtime graphics. As for the cutting edge effects, how many games do you recognize on this list (http://www.opengl.org/applications/windows/games/)?
Here's an interesting bit of history from an OpenGLvsD3d (http://www.azillionmonkeys.com/windoze/OpenGLvsDirect3D.html) page:
The following letter was posted on the Direct X mailing list. It was written by Mark Kilgard in response to an article in the EE Times written by some folks at Intel.
3D programmers,
The following article is a very interesting, though technical, criticism of Direct3D by graphics engineers at Intel. Check out:
http://www.techweb.com/se/directlink.cgi?EET19970526S0082
The above EE Times article explains that when CPU-based 3D engines batch together vertex information so that all the information for a single vertex is in a single contiguous structure, this is in fact not optimal for current Intel microprocessors.
While the article does not directly mention Direct3D, the analysis is a clear criticism of Direct3D's vertex specification scheme. Intel's criticisms still apply even when DirectX 5's new DrawPrimitive interface is used! (By comparsion, as will be explained, OpenGL's vertex array mechanism is extremely well suited for precisely the vertex processing optimizations described by Intel's engineers in the article.)
<snip>
I won't comment on Mark's extrapolations, however as an experienced x86 programmer, I can confirm that this analysis is right on the money. The performance hit sounds about right to me. D3D is not just hard to use, its not just a lesser API than OpenGL, it not only has less functionality than OpenGL but it has also been designed in such a way that there are serious performance implications that can't be worked around. I believe the folks at 3DFX have noticed precisely this same thing some time ago which was their motivation for building GLide and for their current work on OpenGL drivers.
But that's history. D3D9 is much better than D3D5 and comparable to OpenGL (it's gone through a few radical redesigns), and thanks to MonopolySoft, in the near future, new features will be implemented in D3D first, and then in hardware (they plan to do that with D3D10). Thanks to extensions however, OpenGL won't be far behind.
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As for the cutting edge effects, how many games do you recognize on this list (http://www.opengl.org/applications/windows/games/)?
Oi! Someone's (http://fsc.sourceforge.net/) nicked our name!
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a voodoo three makes a mean little oven, i've baked my internal modem with one once. :p
but my current best ever card (i know there's better, but money dictates otherwise )
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v625/Turnsky/The%20Pad/DSC00601.jpg)
mean little card, pratically flawless in operation of pretty much all my games, still want to see how it would handle oblivion.
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Voodoo 2 was the best card ever; played everything right up until Mechwarrior 4 didn't support it anymore.
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What card IS that exactly? I'm guessing it's an ATI, but with that monster AC heatsink (BTW, if the manufacturer put that on, kudos, if YOU put it on, even more kudos) it's hard to tell WHAT card it actually is.
People can go on and on about what the best card was, but honestly, there's no perfect card. ATI's always been plagued with shoddy OGL performance, and linux driver updates are sparse compared to nvidia's, and nVidia's had runs of cards that didnt like to run AA and AF (specifically the 5xxx series cards). 3dFX was based upon an old, nonstandardized rendering method, which required people to code for an additional API. Personally, I've felt nVidia has had the nicest cards. The Geforce 4 series was a great set of cards, while I'd be embarassed to own a 5 series card. They cleaned up thier mess with the 6 series, and still have good performance in OGL, D3D, Linux, and IMO, a better, tighter driver set than ATI's hunk of junk. I ran most of my games on my old Riva TNT, even Quake 3 on it, and I am proud of what it did, but it's surely not worthy of saying "best card ever". There were things that my trusty first-run version of the ATI All-in-Wonder did better than the Riva TNT card did.
OH BTW, the GLIDE wrapper I mentioned is really really old, and I've lost it a long time ago. It was a wrapper of sorts so I could play Hexen II and Quake 2 in the 3dFX Glide modes on my Riva TNT.
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i think my voodoo3 3500 was the longest lasting video card ive had. my geforce 4 barely got two years out of it before i upgraded again. but my voodoo3 lasted like 4. i finally got a geforce 4 to replace it and gave the voodoo3 to my brother. a shame 3dfx went under. considering theyre the ones who started the 3d acceleration craze.
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What card IS that exactly? I'm guessing it's an ATI, but with that monster AC heatsink (BTW, if the manufacturer put that on, kudos, if YOU put it on, even more kudos) it's hard to tell WHAT card it actually is.
HIS Radeon x850 XT
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the only thing i didnt like about glide was that it was inconsistant between 3dfx cards. games designed for the voodoo 1 or voodoo 2 worked poorly or not at all with banshee and voodoo 3 cards. trying to get descent 2 3dfx to run on my voodoo3 was damn near impossible. but thats just the nature of anything proprietary. it elimeates the quality baseline so that the effect cannot be measured by an external source. meaning you have to take their word that it doesnt suck. unlike with ogl, where your expected to get a certain performance and if you dont your not putting enough effort into your product.
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I used to have a voodoo2 too.
When I started modding (before SCP) I used to test my stuff with freespace2 played in Glide mode.
What an error... as I discovered after some months Glide was many times more reliable than d3d, and I was creating bugged stuff simply because I couldn't see the bugs:) Namely the problems were the z-buffer and some other minor modelling issues.
Maybe Glide wasn't all that good for the world but for voodoo owners it was simply superior
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Hence the need for more standardized rendering methods. GLIDE was just too proprietary, at least for my taste, and it seemed that only game devs were taking advantage of it at it's height of use. OGL and D3D are used in a lot of other things rather than just games, and a hell of a lot easier to work with if everything's the same. Having the choice between the two is great, and I wish game devs would give us that option again, instead of coding thier game speifically for D3D or OGL. ID did it with Q2, and hell, Outrage did it with Descent 3. The only game I know of today that still lets you choose is the UT series, UT2K4 at least.
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trying to get descent 2 3dfx to run on my voodoo3 was damn near impossible. but thats just the nature of anything proprietary.
It worked fine for me when I was still using mine. Although I do have other games like Nuclear Strike, which only works right on a V2 and nothing else. On the other hand, D1 3dfx worked great on the V3 but it crashes every few minutes on the V2. I guess no card does everything well. :p
I have always used Nvidia cards since that V3 and probably prefer them slightly just because I know my way around their drivers and third party tools. Although SLI's half-baked vsync support and the 7800 line's crap default AF quality have left a sour taste in my mouth recently.
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I must compliment Voodoo 3 aswell, since it really was a long lasting card in my case aswell. Despite it obvious downsides allready mentioned here, it truly was a nice gaming card in it's time.
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....I can still dual-boot to Win98, and even use Glide if I need to (Yup, that Voodoo2 SLI is still hooked up ;) Now if only it bloody worked in Win2k!!)
Is there a realistic chance of getting a connector cable for the SLI setup these days ?
Since I might get a second V2 from a friend, which I could pair up with the one in my olg gaming machine for some 1024x768 Glide goodness.
On that note: Does FS2 retail work in 1024x768 resolution with SLI Voodoos ?
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yeah, two V2s should support 1024x768 in pretty much everything. As for the SLI cable, it's actually nothing more than a very short floppy cable. If you can read the language, there are instructions to turn a split floppy cable into an SLI cable here: http://forum.3dfx.cz/viewtopic.php?p=7349#7349
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yeah, two V2s should support 1024x768 in pretty much everything. As for the SLI cable, it's actually nothing more than a very short floppy cable. If you can read the language, there are instructions to turn a split floppy cable into an SLI cable here: http://forum.3dfx.cz/viewtopic.php?p=7349#7349
That's most awesome, thanks muchly. It even has english commentaries, but the pics alone would do the job.
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....I can still dual-boot to Win98, and even use Glide if I need to (Yup, that Voodoo2 SLI is still hooked up ;) Now if only it bloody worked in Win2k!!)
Is there a realistic chance of getting a connector cable for the SLI setup these days ?
Since I might get a second V2 from a friend, which I could pair up with the one in my olg gaming machine for some 1024x768 Glide goodness.
On that note: Does FS2 retail work in 1024x768 resolution with SLI Voodoos ?
Mmm... well both my Voodoo2's came with the SLI cable (I now have 2 ;)), but as above it's easy to fab one from an old floppy cable :D
And yes, FS2 does work in 1024x768 :D
And I have to say, retail works a lot better than SCP at the moment on Voodoo2's... I'm not sure if it's the TnL or other fancy stuff but current SCP *really* doesn't like my Voodoo2 setup...
(Come to think of it, it may be because I'm using 2 different cards; An Orchid Righteous 3D 2 and a Creative Labs 3D Blaster 2 in conjunction with some hacked drivers to let me do that ;)
If you can get two cards that are the same, it might be better for you...)